A story exploring time travel and societal issues in the wake of 9/11. This is chapter 23. See previous posts for chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22.
Having just given a talk on the future of money to a crowd of thousands, T2 sat with Ana at a diner near the theater, surrounded by key players in the Anything Federation. While a few people stopped at their table to get selfies with T2, they mostly left him to eat his meal in peace. Finishing their food and paying, Ana went outside first to bring their car around while T2 stood outside in the spring night, smoking a cigarette.
A blue Toyota pulled up. T2 stepped back from the curb to give space to whoever was waiting for this vehicle. Then he saw a young man walking towards him wearing a puffy coat that seemed too warm for the weather. The young man drew a gun from his coat pocket and fired five times. The sound of the firearm was startling enough to knock T2 off balance.
Falling to the ground, he saw only a blank stare on the shooter's face as he dropped the gun and continued walking down the sidewalk. A blank stare, like he had no idea what had just happened. As people on the street started panicking, T2 realized he'd been hit. This was his last conscious thought as he bled out on the concrete.
Ana pulled up and jumped out of her car just in time to watch T2 take his final breaths. She kept everyone else away from him while EMTs arrived to confirm the obvious truth that he was gone. Despite the shock she was in, Ana sent texts to Thomas and Trish and Reed to let them know what was happening. By the time the police had her at the station giving a statement, the entire Federation knew that its leader had been assassinated in Cleveland.
As a former FBI agent, Ana was treated decently by the officers who interviewed her. Within a few hours, she learned that they'd arrested a man named Kyle Clinton Kissinger for the murder. Kissinger was found exercising at his health club and claimed to have no memory of the evening's events. Eventually, a pair of FBI agents arrived at the police station, went over everything one more time with Ana, then told her that they planned to keep the investigation with local law enforcement because there was no evidence that the assassination qualified as an FBI matter, despite the crime's high profile.
Within days, the police had settled on the story that Kissinger was a religious zealot, acting alone, who believed T2 to be the Antichrist. The only evidence for this story was that the assassin attended a church where the pastor had recently given a sermon equating digital currency with the 'mark of the beast.' Ana was livid, seeing this story as one of the most egregious examples of bad police work she'd ever come across. But the matter was out of her hands, so she returned to Boulder to regroup with Federation leadership.
Thomas, Trish, Reed, and Eggs met Ana at her house and went over everything again and again, until they were all exhausted. T2 had long had a plan in place for his death, which Thomas and Ana were executing now. When all of this plan's technical considerations had been seen to, there was nothing left to do but move forward. But that wasn't easy with so many questions still lingering about the shooting.
"I just ... I can't do it," said Thomas over lunch one day. "There's no way he was acting alone. I think Kissinger was programmed to kill. Not programmed like that one guy I heard about, driven nuts by parties unknown until he lashed out uncontrollably. I mean programmed by pros to do this one specific thing."
"So you think he was a Manchurian Candidate?" asked Reed. "Is that even possible?"
"There was a time when the CIA used over eighty institutions, major ones like universities and hospitals, to experiment on people for the purposes of mind control research. Declassified documents suggest that they successfully used hypnosis to create assassins half a century ago. How far do you think this mind control tech might have progressed in fifty years?"
"So you think it was the CIA?" asked Reed.
"No way," said Thomas. "I think it was some big money interest with access to the modern equivalent of that old CIA tech."
"What do you think?" Reed asked Ana.
"My mind keeps coming back to a meeting we had a few months ago," said Ana. "T2 had just given a talk about the connection between Big Pharma and psychiatric diagnoses. I guess he offended someone because they sent an important lawyer to come and scold us."
"I'm not following," said Trish. "What did he say in that talk?"
"The usual, mostly," said Ana. "That Big Pharma has a lobbying component as big as a small country. That every single expert involved in writing the book on psychiatric disorders has financial ties to the companies that medicate these disorders. That kind of stuff."
"So you think Big Pharma offed him?" asked Trish.
"I don't know what to think," said Ana. "But that lawyer at that meeting tried to give T2 five million dollars to stop talking about the industry in public, then he threatened to sue when T2 refused the money. I've been to hundreds of meetings with T2 over the years, and that's the first time something like that's ever happened."
"What do you know about the lawyer?" asked Thomas.
"That's the thing," said Ana. "When I went back to look him up, he was a ghost. All I could find was a picture of him on the website of a Cleveland law firm, but the firm dissolved a month after the meeting, and I haven't been able to reach anyone connected to that firm at all. I know who he is, attorneys have fairly public identities, and I know where he was, but where he is now is totally unknown."
"You tell the cops?" asked Eggs.
"They let me leave messages," said Ana. "But as far as they're concerned, the case is solved."
"Fuck that," said Thomas. "Fuck all of this. I say we find that lawyer ourselves and get him to tell us what he knows."
"Did you save his profile picture?" asked Trish. "We could put that and his name out to the network and find him that way."
"Assuming he's still in the country," said Reed. "But even if we did find him, this whole thing seems a little thin."
"It's better than nothing," shrugged Thomas. "Ana's working her contacts. I'm flying to New York tomorrow to meet with Mr Wachuski to find out what his people have been able to find out. Assuming they weren't behind it. Which they could possibly have been, for reasons we don't yet understand."
"Put his name and face out on the network," said Ana. "We find him, I'll talk to him."
"You guys," said Eggs. "What if this was the government? Like, not the FBI or CIA, but some military contractor, tired of T2's endless antiwar messaging?"
"Do mercenaries create mind-controlled assassins?" asked Trish.
"Someone does," said Thomas. "Someone did. Between us, we've got the resources to figure this out. But we should probably get a plan together for what to do with the truth once we find it."
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
Read my novels:
Check out the comic I wrote:
